nightstand
by Matthew Stokdyk
He liked Durex condoms,
and I liked Trojan;
we kept both in the drawer.
Later, she liked none,
but I kept them there
in case we came to our senses.
One of five poems originally published in Anatomy of Our Nightstands, a zine curated by Yusi Liu for the Spring 2021 edition of the Little Book Project in Madison. You will note some recurrent themes in the poems, chiefly angst (originating with me) and certain motifs picked up from a 2018 exhibition Yusi held in her home in Madison. It examined, in part, the functions of and associations between domestic spaces and objects (including the impetus for the Little Book: what one might keep in a nightstand that one keeps nowhere else, like contraception, drugs, personal effects, purely utilitarian objects, etc.).